Did Somebody Say "Fringe"?

Not so long ago, Rand Paul—son of Ron, "modern-day revolutionary," and practicing ophthalmologist—would have been written off as a harmless political extremist. For believing that the Federal Reserve should be gutted. Or that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Or that the Department of Education is un-American. But with the help of his dad and a legion of devoted Tea Partiers, chances are good he will soon be the most radical member of the U.S. Senate

Try as they might, the gracious members of the Fayette County Republican Party cannot coax Rand Paul into their tent. It's a humid summer evening, and they are holding their annual picnic on the lawn of a forty-two-acre estate in the heart of Kentucky's horse country. The men sport polo shirts and khakis, the women sundresses and pearls. They sip iced teas and lemonade and circulate beneath a giant white party tent that's been pitched against the ominous gray clouds rolling in. The whole thing feels less like a political event than a Junior League benefit or some sort of luxury-real-estate open house—which it may well be, considering the picnic's hosts are currently trying to sell their place for $4.5 million.

This year, though, things are a little different from the past. The Republicans of Fayette County have been forced to go a bit down-market, not because of the lingering recession but to accommodate Paul and the band of Tea Partiers who swept him through the primaries and completely upended the way politics has been practiced here for generations. So tonight's menu features barbecue rather than filet mignon. And the silent auction includes Tea Party–friendly fare such as a DON'T TREAD ON ME T-shirt and Glenn Beck's new thriller novel, alongside the glass elephants and Callaway golf gear. And of course, there's Paul himself, tonight's headline speaker, who until very recently was dismissed by many in the GOP establishment as "too kooky for Kentucky."

It's time for dinner, and the Fayette County GOP chairwoman, Carol Rogers, approaches me. "I just wanted to point out that all of our candidates are serving the food tonight," she says. All, that is, except for Paul. He's standing apart from the crowd, his Timberlake-esque curls getting damp in the light drizzle that has started to fall. When Paul arrived an hour earlier, his aide told the ladies at the registration table that the candidate wouldn't be wearing the name tag they'd printed out for him. I noticed a little later that he'd relented and stuck the tag above his breast pocket, but now, strangely, it has somehow migrated to the back of his pant leg.

Paul has often refused to do the things expected of Kentucky politicians: the backslapping, the ring kissing, the traditional Derby picks (Paul's campaign said he was rooting for a "trifecta of a balanced budget, term limits, and a strong national defense"). "I don't think he even knows the words to 'My Old Kentucky Home,' " one prominent Republican griped to me. "I mean, I'm sure he knows the refrain, but you probably know the refrain." Until he decided to run for Senate last year, Paul wasn't even a politician but rather an ophthalmologist. If Bill Clinton is famous for looking people in the eye and making them feel like the only person in the room, Paul gives the impression he's checking for cataracts.

After a few more minutes in the rain, he comes inside the tent and waits to be introduced to the crowd. When it's finally his turn to speak, Paul, standing well under six feet, adjusts the microphone so that it's no longer pointing at his forehead and begins ticking off the litany of Republican talking points: no to cap-and-trade, yes to extending the Bush tax cuts, no to Obamacare.

But Paul, who prides himself on delivering his remarks without notes, makes plenty of departures from the GOP script. He doesn't so much give a speech as deliver a lecture, filled with digressions characterized by a slight air of condescension. He recites Emily Dickinson (Fame is a bee. / It has a song— / It has a sting— / Ah, too, it has a wing) and indulges himself in a dry tangent about the Ninth Amendment and the protection of rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The crowd is mostly silent and a little glazed for large stretches of the speech, but all that changes when Paul gears up for his big finish. "People try to paint the Tea Party and they say, 'Oh, the Tea Party is extreme.' I respond right back to them, 'What is extreme is a $2 trillion deficit!' They want to say the Tea Party is something that it's not. You see them condemning; you see what they tried to do to me after the election. They want to make us out to be something that we're not. But we're going to keep saying what we're about!" The audience comes to life, giving Paul his loudest applause of the night, but he doesn't stay around to soak it up. By the time the next speech is under way, Paul's already on the road, leaving the Tea Partiers and the country-club folk behind.

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Had the Republican establishment gotten its way, the man delivering the keynote that evening would have been Kentucky's secretary of state, Trey Grayson. A few days after the picnic, I stop by the statehouse in Frankfort to see him. It's the middle of the workweek, but the only stirrings come from a tour guide leading a small group past some pictures of famous Kentuckians. ("George Clooney is from Kentucky. Tom Cruise went to high school in Kentucky. Johnny Depp was born in Kentucky. Annie Potts…") More than two months have passed since Paul beat him in the GOP primary, but Grayson still has the slightly dazed look of a guy trying to figure out what hit him. "We closed with ads with Senator McConnell saying, 'I need Trey.' We doubled down on the establishment message," he says. "That was a mistake." Sitting behind his empty desk in his quiet office, he shakes his head. "I wish we'd had an idea just how anti-incumbent the mood was before 6 p.m. on primary day."

Grayson wasn't an incumbent. He was running for an open seat after Kentucky's junior senator, the cantankerous 78-year-old Jim Bunning, announced he wouldn't seek reelection. But everyone in Kentucky knew that Bunning had been forced into retirement by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, Kentucky's senior senator, and the father of the modern Kentucky GOP. And everyone in Kentucky also knew that Grayson—who in 2003, at the age of 31, had been elected secretary of state—was McConnell's choice to replace Bunning. In a Republican state party that is extraordinarily hierarchical, even by Republican state-party standards, it was Grayson's turn.

Paul had no standing within that hierarchy. Since moving to the state in 1993, he had run Kentucky Taxpayers United, a watchdog group that graded legislators on tax issues, but as Al Cross, the former political reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, told me, "He didn't make it very high on the radar of politics in Kentucky." Ted Jackson, a Republican consultant in Louisville, put it a bit more bluntly: "Rand Paul could have walked into the Republican Party headquarters in any county in Kentucky and no one would have been able to pick him out of a lineup."

What Paul did have was his last name. He's the son of Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and gadfly presidential candidate, whose extreme libertarianism has made him a pariah to mainstream Republicans but a hero to fringier elements of the GOP. Like his father, Paul wanted to essentially obliterate the federal government—gutting some parts (the Department of Agriculture, the Internal Revenue Service) and outright abolishing others (the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency). All of which allowed him to tap into the network of "Ron Paul Revolutionaries" who'd contributed more than $30 million to his dad's 2008 presidential campaign.

He also had a freewheeling campaign operation that depended on, and thus endeared him to, the media. "We took every interview, answered every question, and he became the rock star that he is because of that," says David Adams, the Kentucky blogger who served as Paul's campaign manager during the primary. The press, in turn, repaid him with coverage that portrayed him as an underdog crusader rather than a radical ideologue.

Most important, Paul had the nothing-to-lose freedom to attack the most powerful figure in Kentucky—and in some respects national Republican—politics: McConnell. "I got into this initially because there were rumors they were trying to push Jim Bunning out of office," Paul said on the stump. He didn't need to remind voters that McConnell was the one doing the pushing. And he didn't need to point out that Bunning had defied McConnell by refusing to vote in support of the bank bailout in October 2008. No matter how muddled and contradictory the Tea Party message can sometimes be, the TARP legislation, as the bailout is known, has always been a fundamental part of its creation myth. When you talk to Tea Party leaders, they'll express their disgust with Obama, for sure, but they'll also point out that the movement was formed not in response to the president but in response to the bailout—which was voted on before Obama entered the White House—and that those who supported it should be held accountable.

That's how McConnell, a guy you'd think would be wildly popular with Republicans in Kentucky (he'd spent the last three decades turning it from blue to red and now, as minority leader, is masterfully using Senate procedures to obstruct and frustrate Obama's agenda at every turn) came to be a target of the Tea Partiers within his own state. The fact that he'd been in Washington so long—and had been one of thirty-four Republican Senators to vote for TARP—was proof that he was tainted. "There's a difference between a Republican with a little R by his name and a conservative," a Tea Party leader named Mica Sims said of McConnell when I spoke with her in Lexington. "The next time he has an election, he'll probably have a primary challenger."

Paul capitalized on the rage toward the bailout and toward McConnell (who himself isn't on a ballot until 2014) to hammer Grayson throughout the primary. It didn't matter that Grayson also opposed the bailout; Paul attacked him for holding a fund-raiser with seventeen senators—including McConnell—who voted for the TARP legislation. Grayson was McConnell's guy, and Kentucky conservatives were going to use him to send a message. Paul wound up trouncing him by twenty-three points.

···

He didn't get to savor his victory for long. Less than twenty-four hours after his triumphant speech—"I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We've come to take our government back!"—Paul found himself on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show. One year earlier, he'd gone on the program to announce he was going to run for the Senate—an announcement Maddow greeted with the prediction that Paul (and his father) were the type of Republicans who could help the GOP get its "mojo" back. Now he was returning to where it all began, as the newly minted Republican nominee. Except this time, Maddow pressed him on what she described as "the potentially more controversial side of his small-government views"—specifically his stance on the most sacrosanct piece of legislation of the twentieth century, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Paul, who's not one to back down from a debate, declared his philosophical opposition on the grounds that the federal government shouldn't interfere with private businesses.

The fallout was immediate, and with his general-election campaign threatening to implode before it even began, Paul was forced to issue the sort of press release seldom seen in Obama's America (or Reagan's or Nixon's, for that matter), stating "unequivocally" that he "will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964." Republican heavyweights like Karl Rove reportedly told him to stop talking to the press—which he did, including backing out of a previously scheduled interview on NBC's Meet the Press, joining Louis Farrakhan and a Saudi prince as the only people to have canceled on the show in its sixty-two-year history. Then Paul went into the political equivalent of the witness-protection program ("Where in the world is Rand Paul?" asked the Associated Press); his campaign told inquiring reporters that he was busy seeing eye patients in Bowling Green.

When he emerged a couple of weeks later, Paul was a different candidate. He had replaced Adams as campaign manager with Jesse Benton, who is married to Paul's niece and who managed his father's 2008 presidential campaign. Under Benton, the Paul campaign became a more traditional, press-wary operation. "The scrutiny and the media bias we encounter makes us have to be much more message-disciplined," Benton told me in a brief interview that occurred only because, after numerous unreturned phone and e-mail messages, I finally showed up unannounced at Paul's campaign headquarters. "We're fighting to go to Washington, D.C., and there are a lot of folks out there who are trying to stop us."

Paul now confines his national media appearances to Fox News and conservative talk radio. In Kentucky, the campaign often doesn't release his schedule to the state's papers and TV stations (reporters have to get word of Paul's appearances from third parties), and at one point during the summer he refused to answer any questions that weren't previously submitted in writing.

I witnessed the campaign's rather ham-fisted press strategy firsthand in August when I wrote a story for GQ.com about Paul's college days at Baylor University in the early 1980s. The piece primarily dealt with his membership in a secret society called the NoZe Brotherhood, which existed, in part, to torment the Baylor administration. The story recounted a prank Paul and another NoZe brother had played on a female friend, who claimed that the two had showed up at her apartment, tied her up, blindfolded her, and then drove her back to their apartment, where they tried to get her to do bong hits with them. When she refused, they drove her to a creek, where the prank got even weirder. "They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him," the woman recalled to me.

Days before the story ran, I'd asked Benton in an e-mail if Paul had any memory of the prank. He replied with a classic nondenial: "During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas," which I quoted at the end of my piece. The Aqua Buddha story ran on a Monday and quickly mushroomed into a political scandal. By the end of the day, Benton was telling reporters that I had been spotted digging through the Dumpster at the Paul campaign's office. By the next evening, the Paul campaign sent out a fund-raising e-mail, referencing my story and asking, "Can you help our campaign fight back, today and in the coming weeks, against the libelous attacks of the leftist media?"

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The biggest challenge for Paul these days, however, is not deflecting questions about bong hits and Aqua Buddha. It's not even fending off the constant attacks from his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway. ("We are going to take a two-by-four to the guy every day," one Democratic strategist says of Paul.) It's figuring out how to cozy up to the GOP establishment without alienating his rabid base. Once Paul won the nomination, his purity test regarding the bank bailout, which had been his most potent weapon in the primary, went out the window. In late June, Paul headed to D.C. for a fund-raiser of his own, hosted by twelve Republican senators, nine of whom voted for the bailout. But the trip wasn't just about raising money; it was also a sensitive diplomatic mission to reassure Republicans that he's not the fringe figure they fear—that he isn't, in effect, his father.

Ron Paul, in addition to his extreme views on the federal government, has been a harsh critic of the Republican Party's "military adventurism," and in the past Rand has faithfully echoed his father's views. He opposed the war in Iraq, once characterized the September 11 attacks as "blowback for our foreign policy," and scoffed at the threat of Iranian nukes. And yet here he was in Washington, seeking out a secret meeting with some of the Ron Paul Revolutionaries' biggest bogeymen. At a private office in Dupont Circle, he talked foreign policy with Bill Kristol, Dan Senor, and Tom Donnelly, three prominent neocons who'd been part of an effort to defeat him during the primary. "He struck me as genuinely interested in trying to understand why people like us were so apoplectic," Senor says of their two-hour encounter. "He wanted to get educated about our problem with him. He wasn't confrontational, and he wasn't disagreeable. He didn't seem cemented in his views. He was really in absorption mode."

The following month, he met with officials from the powerful lobbying group AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which has frequently clashed with Ron Paul over what the group views as his insufficient support of Israel. Paul, according to one person familiar with the AIPAC meeting, "told them what they wanted to hear: 'I'm more reasonable than my father on the things you care about.' He was very solicitous."

All of this has left Republicans in a state of high anxiety about which positions Paul will maintain—and which ones he's willing to bend on—once he enters the Senate. "After the primary, there's been a split and a debate," a Republican strategist involved in efforts to derail Paul this past spring tells me. "Half of us think Paul is far more ambitious than his father—he doesn't just want to prove a point, he wants to be a player—and that his ambition will outweigh his ideology." According to this view, Paul's success will ensure his obedience. "I think he'll be laundered by the Senate a little bit," another prominent conservative predicts. "He'll still sometimes be a pain in the neck for the leadership, but I'd expect him to get Senate-ized over time."

But not everyone is so sure. Says the Republican strategist, "There's the other half who think he really is his father's kid, he's kind of a schmuck, and he may well lose a seat we should otherwise win—and frankly, we aren't terribly upset about it."

This debate is at its most intense inside the head of Mitch McConnell. During the primary, McConnell's only meeting with Paul took place in a hangar at the Louisville airport. According to a person familiar with the conversation, McConnell pressed Paul to pledge to vote for him for Republican leader—something Paul refused to do. (Billy Piper, McConnell's chief of staff, denies that his boss sought Paul's commitment.) All these months later, Paul still won't make a firm pledge. "The whole question of 'Will Rand vote for McConnell for leader?' is a power play," explains one Paul ally. "If Mitch is a little bit on edge, so much the better. He should be."

The two men didn't sit for a meeting again until four days after Paul's primary victory—this time in Frankfort for a GOP Unity Rally at which Grayson, McConnell, and other prominent Kentucky Republicans endorsed Paul. After the rally, the group retreated to a conference room in the Kentucky Republican Party headquarters (officially known as the Mitch McConnell Building), where McConnell realized he was no longer in a position to be making demands of Paul. "He wasn't forcing opinions on anyone," one of the meeting's participants says of McConnell. "He just gave advice on the things Rand wanted advice on. He was in answer mode." Since then, McConnell has continued to go to bat for Paul, privately and publicly. "He's doing the professional thing," says Michael Clingaman, a former ecutive director of the Kentucky GOP. "He's laser focused on what matters most: retaining the seat and keeping the numbers in the Senate."

Under McConnell's leadership, the Senate GOP caucus has marched in remarkable lockstep; defections and dissent are rare. In the absence of any actual policy proposals, this has been the Republicans' great strength. But there's a real worry within the power center of the GOP that Paul will take his seat and eventually throw all the happy party conformity into disarray. In July, Paul told the National Review that he intends to form a "Tea Party caucus" in the Senate. "I think I will be part of a nucleus with Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, who are unafraid to stand up," he said. "If we get another loud voice in there, like Mike Lee from Utah or Sharron Angle from Nevada, there will be a new nucleus."

And therein lies the problem with the Tea Party candidates. The more they become an electoral force, the more the Republican establishment has to cater to them, and the more vocal and disruptive to the party's actual agenda they'll potentially become. It's one thing to oppose Obama; it's another to oppose legislation and threaten relationships that have been central to how the GOP does business. Paul doesn't support the military spending most of his fellow Republicans slobber over. He doesn't support handing out big fat prescription-drug benefits to private insurance companies. He doesn't support the earmarks that Republican senators, especially McConnell, use to curry favor with voters back home. And in a chamber where arcane procedural rules make it possible for a single member to gum up the legislative works, the presence of just one rogue Republican—much less a whole Tea Party caucus of them—could be enough to make the Senate Republicans finally seem as undisciplined and dysfunctional as the Democrats.

···

Back in Kentucky on a Tuesday night in the middle of the summer, a state-rep candidate named Frank Haynes is holding a rally at a National Guard armory on the outskirts of Frankfort. Republicans happen to be in the minority in this part of Kentucky ("Being a Republican here is like being in the desert," the local GOP chair tells me), so the crowd of fifty people sitting in metal folding chairs is a pretty respectable turnout. But rather than talk about the state issues that might have an actual bearing on his race, Haynes stands before them and compares Nancy Pelosi to Nikita Khrushchev and Mao. "If you've been watching what's going on the last eighteen months, you see the ultimate goal that the progressives have," he says. "The hippies of the '60s are now the ones that are in control of Congress, and their goal is to make this a totalitarian government where they control every aspect of your life."

Paul has driven two-plus hours from Bowling Green, where he spent the morning doing eye surgery, to make an appearance on Haynes's behalf. He delivers the closest thing he has to a standard stump speech—the only new part, to my ears, is a quote from T. S. Eliot—and after he's done, I and a few other reporters sidle up to him.

One asks Paul about his now familiar contention that the press is out to get the Tea Party. "I don't ever call somebody a Muslim or do any of that kind of stuff," he replies, "but if there's a picture of President Obama as a Muslim, everybody says that's what the Tea Party is about." He adds, "I was at Bush's first inauguration with my two small children, and people came up to us and would yell stuff, like—" he pauses and mouths the word fuck—"you to my kids and stuff, you know? But does that represent all Democrats?"

Just fifteen minutes earlier the candidate whom Paul came out to support was likening the current Speaker of the House to a former Soviet dictator, so I ask if he thinks that's what the press might be referring to when they say the Tea Party is extreme. He leans forward and smiles. "Well, I think whether or not your analogies are over the top, whether you might extend an analogy farther than others might, is not something to be reviled. It's just an opinion, you know?"

He pauses for a moment, as if wondering whether he should say more, then gives in to the urge. "But I don't hear that and say, 'Oh, he's absolutely wrong.' I hear him and say that our country is slipping towards that, and there could be a time when we slip and lose a lot of our freedoms. I'll say things like that Ben Franklin statement: 'Those who give up their liberty for security will have neither.' I worry about a time when we would have chaos in our country and then a strong national leader would come along and say, 'Give me your liberty and I'll give you security.' Not that it's imminent or happening tomorrow or applies to any particular players on the stage, but there are historical examples."

Paul pauses again, although this time it's not out of any hesitation on his part; he's just making sure we're still with him. "In 1923, when they destroyed the currency, they elected Hitler. And so they elected somebody who vilified one group of people, but he promised them, 'I will give you security if you give me your liberty,' and they voted him in. And that's not to mean that anybody around is Hitler, but it's to mean that you don't want chaos in your country. And we could have chaos, not just because of the Democrats, but because the Democrats and the Republicans have all been spending us into oblivion. And having a massive debt runs the risk of chaos at some point. Not tomorrow, maybe not next week—I mean, I can't even predict the stock market six months from now. But I think that a country is in danger that spends beyond its means and lives beyond its means. And I don't ever say it started with President Obama. I think it started long ago."

It's an incredible performance, one that begins with a gentle distancing from a loony analogy before reframing the analogy to make it seem less loony, then introducing a new analogy that isn't just loony, it's repugnant, but that also, as the analogy gets fleshed out in greater detail, begins to reveal itself as conforming to a certain logic that might be worthy of debate—all before ending on a bipartisan, pox-on-both-their-houses note that makes it clear that no, he was not comparing Obama to Hitler.

Unlike some of the prominent Tea Party leaders he's routinely lumped in with, Paul is not an idiot. When I asked a friend of his to characterize Paul's conversations with Sarah Palin, who provided him with an early endorsement, the friend replied: "Brief." Paul doesn't avoid the press because, like Sharron Angle, he's afraid of revealing his ignorance; rather, he does so because he's afraid he'll be unable to resist the temptation to prove how smart he is.

"If you challenge him intellectually, he's incapable of letting it go," says one GOP consultant to whom the Paul campaign has reached out for advice. "I'm sure he's wonderful at dinner parties, but he can't be having a dinner party debate with Rachel Maddow on national television." In fact, it's easy to imagine that in Paul's heart of hearts, he'd much prefer being interviewed by a smart person who deeply disagrees with him, like Maddow, than a doofus with whom he's in superficial accord, like Sean Hannity.

And yet it's the Hannity watchers of the world who have transformed this awkward man—someone who has more affection for the dead poets he quotes in his speeches than for the audiences to which he gives them—into a populist hero. To their ears, Paul isn't articulating a dogmatic ideology that has traditionally held little appeal to most Americans because it privileges the free market above everything else; he's offering the only appropriate response to the tyrannical socialist agenda being perpetrated in Washington. He isn't making a tortured historical analogy about the dangers of centralized power; he's calling Obama Hitler. It's why, back during the primary, as Michael Clingaman put it, "people were ready to walk over glass to vote for Rand Paul." And it's why, come November, they'll be ready to do so again. When I ask David Adams, Paul's erstwhile campaign manager, about his old boss's many peculiarities, he replies: "He's a once-in-a-lifetime character. He's perfectly suited for this moment." The moment is strange enough that he's probably right.

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